Saturday, August 24, 2013

Election 2013: Day 19 (or, the litmus test)

A very quick blog post today because last night I was moderating the Our Say Forum for candidate in the seat of Fraser and so didn’t have time to write a post yesterday, and today is Saturday so I pretty much tune out.

On Wednesday my Drum article had a go at Rudd for coming up with Seven Pillars that were more thought bubble than policy. Interestingly the past couple of days he has been nicely adding some weight baring strength to a couple of the pillars.

On the pillar of red-tape and making life easier for small business he has changed the rules for small business paying their PPL, increased the number of businesses able to access the “Small Business Superannuation Clearing House”, and most strikingly, yesterday he changed the rules for businesses on administering the GST.

The cost of this policy is a bit of an issue. David Bradbury saying: “The cost is small but unquantifiable across the forward estimates”, which is a bit interesting, shall we say. If that is the case it certainly does make you wonder why it has taken 12 years of the GST before someone decided to do it.

The Libs will no doubt adopt the policy ASAP.

So Rudd has being doing some good policy work. It’s stuff I think he should have done before the election, and it’s why I always thought he should go late. Going to the election when he did denied him a chance to do government type things that gave people the impression he was back in charge, hand on the tiller.

Instead for most people looking back it feels like he became PM then called an election. Honestly, think to yourself. Can you remember anything he did between becoming PM and the the election?

He dumped the carbon tax, but not really. The legislation hasn’t gone through so it was actually an election promise, not a government decision.

All that was done was the school funding deals. But he went to the polls without getting QLD on board, so again there is the sense he was just getting enough states on board (ie Victoria) to mean Abbott had little space to run on it.

There wasn’t much of being a nice boring stable government in that time.

Ah well.

***

Yesterday Tony Abbott announced his latest version of his asylum seeker policy. The good thing about each new incarnation is they gets just that slightly bit more insane.

Yesterdays one involved announcing he would be increasing the AFP presence in Indonesia (not discussed with Indonesia) and to pay money to people in Indonesia to inform on people smugglers and a plan to buy boats from fishermen that were going to be sold to people smugglers.

People who still have their brains intact, heard this policy and laughed out loud. Those who didn’t can no longer to claim and sense of impartiality.

So what did the editor of The Daily Telegraph do? Well he stuck it on Page 8 with a positive headline. The editor of The Advertiser was dumb enough to put it on page one with a glowing headline.

At this point you have to wonder if they administer the Kool-Aid to such people in daily or weekly doses.

But look, if you are feeling bad about things, don’t worry, it could have been worse: you could have been one of the three people who contributed to this article:

***

Actually it could be worse. You could have written this:

It contains such paragraphs as:

“In the upper floor of the shelter he wanders through the crowd like it's his family barbecue, greeting everyone by name, touching shoulders and kissing cheeks.

“In a salmon jacket and killer black boots, Margie is not just a mere cosy accompaniment, but is equally engaged, both with punters and her man. She squeezes his hand; she cutely taps him on the bum. She cannot hide her affection for him.”

and it ends:

“Clearly, Tony Abbott is not here to be served, but to serve.”

But the best line of all is this:

His secret is out. When the cameras are long stashed in their bags, with no boom microphones floating above his receding hairline, and not a pesky journalist in sight, Tony Abbott, it appears, likes to indulge in a little humanity.

Indeed Andrew Carswell, there wasn’t one journalist in sight.

***

At a certain point you move beyond parody and into insanity.

Seriously, Tony Abbott says this:

“I don't want to be too sanctimonious about this given the pressure she was under, but it is demeaning to our polity and dispiriting to our people when there is no assumption of good faith, no benefit of the doubt given. The Parliament always takes its cue from the prime minister.''

Actually Abbott, your party and its supporters also take its cue from you.

The Opposition Leader is always rewriting history, but the MSM giving credence to such blatant falsehoods shows how easy it is for truth and democratic, liberal ideals to be undermined.

If anyone made me like the ALP it was the former Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. Her removal from the political sphere is a blow to the body politic, not only because of her superior negotiating skills, diligence and comprehension of each task that she undertook, but most for her accomplishments in advancing people's lives in employment, health, education, communication and the environment. All her policies were designed for the twenty-first century, not the twentieth.

Frankly, why should I vote for Abbott, who instigated and engaged in the nasty denigration of her character based upon perfidy and tried to prevent fine policies from being implemented or Rudd, who undermined not only Gillard but the ALP agenda, or the Greens, who tried to gain political advantage over Labor during the most vitriolic of Abbott's onslaught? However, in Abbott and the Coalition I see no glimmer of hope, no altruism, only an extremely nationalistic, anti-democratic, anti-liberal, hardened authoritarianism, an ideology frozen in a past century and accompanied by bully-boy tactics.

Baker's piece in Fairfax raises incredulity to new heights - lazy puff piece journalism that even the Kooyong Young Liberals might have found embarrassing.Abbott's comment the previous day that Gillard was nasty to him is Propaganda 101 - accuse your opponents of the very things you have been doing as a deliberate strategy.Incredibly, the media, which likes to present itself as the watchdogs of democracy, passed this off without comment or any attempt at least to compare Abbott's words with his record.

Couldn't agree more with you about the Mark Baker article. I have managed to control myself reading most of the abysmal commentary on this election, but this really made me lose it. Tony Abbott's relentless, misogynistic attacks were unrelenting for the whole time Julia Gillard was in office. How stupid does he think we are?

am heartened by Tony Abbot's rationale for his generous paid parental leave policy. When questioned today by ABC radio he said if it is good enough for ABC and the public service to pay its employee full wages on parental leave why not every one else? I look forward to receiving my taxpayer funded life time pension when I retire now at 40, because if it is good enough for him and his fellow parliamentarians then why not everybody else?